Phil Spencer and his team over at Microsoft’s gaming division have been
Project Scarlett is known to have two consoles, namely Lockhart, a lower-end disc-less version and its higher-end sibling, codenamed Anaconda. According to sources, both will be powered team red’s chips, with an 8-core (16T), 7nm Zen2 based CPU, coupled with a Radeon Navi GPU offering up to 4TFLOPs of processing power. Lockhart will reportedly feature 12GB of GDDR6 memory to feed the Navi GPU and 1 TB of NVMe based SSD storage. Lockhart is supposedly built for streaming games, rather than natively rendering them. The absence of disc-support also points to a fully digital eco-system.
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Comparatively, Anaconda packs a lot more firepower with around 12TFLOPs of graphics processing capability courtesy of a custom Navi GPU which is odd considering that Navi is supposed to be a mid-range part. Just as a measure of comparison, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is rated at 11.5 TFLOPs while the RTX 2080 Ti manages almost 14 TFLOPs. To be fair, I’m a bit skeptical of these figures, but I suppose we’ll see. The CPU and storage are same as Lockhart, but the memory has been beefed up to 16GB GDDR6, and it also features a disk drive. As per reports, the Xbox “Anaconda” will launch with a price tag of $499.
Now, speculating and all is well and good, but the actual specs might actually vary considerably, especially on the GPU side. Furthermore, it’s possible that Microsoft might not reveal too much about the console this E3 and just give a nod to gamers about the consoles’ existence, and at the same time prodding Sony to make their move.
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Compute performance (measured in FLOPs) cannot be compared between graphics processors of totally different designs to determine their relative [games] rendering performance. A current 12 TFLOP AMD processor does not have better graphics rendering performance relative to an 11.5 TFLOP Nvidia GPU.
For example, an AMD Vega 64 might have more compute performance than a Nvidia GTX1080Ti, but it has considerably inferior graphics rendering performance using common modern APIs such as Direct3D. Basically meaning it’s considerably slower for rendering games.
It seems fairly realistic that AMD Navi could have 12TFLOPs compute performance in a next gen games console. However that figure as stated doesn’t precisely tell us about how fast the console would be for rendering graphics. Based on current knowledge of AMD graphics architecture such a chip isn’t likely to be particularly faster than an aforementioned Vega 64.
That’s about twice as fast as the GPU inside Xbox One X. However, it’s significantly slower (for games) than something like an RTX2080 or GTX1080Ti, let alone an RTX2080Ti. It wouldn’t be a cutting edge machine by the time it launches, but it will be a reasonable upgrade over Xbox One X.
Lockhart isn’t the streaming console. Maverick is the streaming console. Lockhart is supposed to be a console for casuals.